Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Bairbre N’Cinneide asked I was rewatching “A Few Good Men” and I was wondering about the obsession with Cuba. Has Cuba ever invaded the US? I seem to remember the US trying to invade Cuba.

I could probably make an entire episode on the relationship between the United States and Cuba. I’d recommend listening to my episode on the Spanish-American War to give an historical background for the movie a Few Good Men.

Cuba is the largest country in the Caribbean by a wide margin. It has more land and people than every other island combined. It also happens to be very close to the United States, although technically, the Bahamas is closer.

In the 19th century, there was talk of taking Cuba from Spain and making it a US state.

The US invaded the island when it was still held by Spain in 1898. The US occupied the island for a few years, and when Theodore Roosevelt became president, he was a big supporter of Cuban independence, so they became independent in 1902.

In 1903, Cuba allowed the US to establish a naval base at Guantánamo Bay for an annual payment. A 1934 treaty established the lease as being perpetual and the annual payment to be $4,085 US dollars.

The base was actually a large employer for local Cubans up until the commumist revolution in 1958 when the based was sealed off. Guantánamo has been a sore point in US/Cuban relations ever since, and the current Cuban government has refused to cash the annual lease payment checks the US government sends every year.

Guantánamo Bay is definitely worthy of an episode of its own in the future.